Chronicling the high cost of our legal system
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“An American Indian tribe sued some of the world’s largest beer makers today, claiming they knowingly contributed to devastating alcohol-related problems on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.” The Oglala Sioux tribe is asking for $500 million. [AP; Lincoln Journal-Star; Don Surber] More: Jacob Sullum, Ted Frank.
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Ted Frank, who’s challenging the Cobell (Indian trust) class action fees as part of his work with the Center for Class Action Fairness, catches out a lawyer who claims to have worked for more than nine hours a day on the case for 14 years, including a 7-year stretch in which he purportedly worked “an average of eleven hours a day, every day seven days a week without a single day off.” [Above the Law, earlier]
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Recent clips on a subject treated in much more detail in Schools for Misrule:
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Criticism continues to mount (”shameful,” “excessive”) over lawyers’ effort to nab $223 million in fees for representing Indian tribes’ interest in the long-running Cobell litigation over management of trust funds. [BLT (quoting former Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D.), and more (DoJ); PoL; earlier here and here (Kilpatrick Stockton lawyer Keith Harper considered for Tenth Circuit appointment)]
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Plaintiff’s lawyers agreed to seek a maximum of $99.9 million in fees in the settlement of the Cobell class action over federal mismanagement of Indian tribal trust funds. Now, however, a different number has suddenly appeared on the agenda: $223 million. [National Law Journal]
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…of access to tribally unaffiliated Indian antiquities and remains, now endangered by new regulations from the Department of the Interior [Robert L. Kelly, New York Times] Earlier on the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and Kennewick Man controversy here, here, etc.
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The historic town of Mauch Chunk, Pa. changed its name to Jim Thorpe, Pa. as part of a deal to honor the Native American-descended athlete. Now a lawsuit is invoking the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA) to demand removal of Thorpe’s remains to Oklahoma [Never Yet Melted]
Meanwhile, scientists, universities and museums are considering their legal options in the face of new Interior Department interpretations of NAGPRA mandating “that after appropriate tribal consultation, transfer of culturally unidentifiable remains is to be made to a tribe from whose tribal or aboriginal lands the remains were excavated or removed.” [Indian Country Today, April; earlier posts on Kennewick Man controversy]
Keith Harper, now with Kilpatrick Stockton, is a longtime Native American Rights Fund attorney and class counsel in the gigantic Indian trust fund litigation, Cobell. Some critics focus on his prospective appointment for an “Oklahoma seat” on the court, others are not happy with developments in Cobell. [Tulsa World, Kimberly Craven/Billings Gazette]
According to news reports in recent days, some members of Iroquois Indian tribes are claiming a right to travel internationally on tribal “passports”, and U.S. officials — including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, at the request of upstate Rep. Louise Slaughter and other New York politicos — have leaned over backwards to let them do so. As I relate in my forthcoming book, some Indian tribes in the U.S. have been getting louder in asserting that they have the rights and perquisites of actual state sovereignty — something U.S. Supreme Court precedent makes very clear they do not have — and have been invoking international human rights law, and its precepts in defense of the rights of indigenous peoples, in support of those vain claims. That seems to be going on to some extent here too.
The State Department has long accepted some casual use of tribal “passports” given a number of tribes’ geographic sprawl across the U.S.-Canada border (where until recently the paperwork burdens for travelers were minimal anyway). If it is now beginning to play along with bogus assertions of a right to use Indian passports in travel around the world, that would be big news. Let’s hope that’s not what the new reports mean.
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In the latest round in the prolonged controversy over the Nantucket Sound development, Aquinnah Wampanoag Indians who live on the west side of Martha’s Vineyard say that turbines off the east side of the island would spoil their welcome of the morning sun [NYT, WSJ editorial]
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Following thirty years of battles, the Obama Administration signaled that it would extend federal recognition to the Shinnecock tribe. Of particular interest: “The tribe is also hoping to resolve more than $1 billion worth of land disputes in the Hamptons, including its claim to the site of the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, which has played host to the U.S. Open several times.” [NYT] Backed by casino promoters, the tribe filed a massive land claim in 2005 which I wrote about at the time in the NYT; a federal judge rejected the case the next year, following a turn against Indian land claims at the Second Circuit level.
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Indian rights, religious freedom, equality claims and strict criminal penalties have gotten into a tangled mat [Marcia Zug, Prawfsblawg] Earlier on eagle feather law here, here, and here.
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Missed from earlier this year: in the fall of 2007, following extensive litigation, the government of Canada began issuing payments to persons of Indian ancestry who had attended an officially promoted network of residential schools where abuse was common and whose aim of assimilating students into broader Canadian life was later assailed as calculated to suppress native culture. While the payments brought benefit to many recipients, among others they seem to have led to new cycles of dysfunction, family strife and substance abuse. [Jack Branswell and Ken Meaney, "Native suicides linked to compensation", Canwest/National Post, Jan. 26 via Western Standard]
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This Saturday at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, near L.A., the Federalist Society will be holding its all-day third annual Western Conference. This time the theme is the law of American Indians and Indian tribes, a topic of immense intellectual interest and also of much practical importance to non-Indians through much of the rural West, in localities nationwide where casino development rouses controversy, and even, as I have pointed out in a couple of articles, to complete bystanders in the East who have found their land title suddenly thrown into doubt by the revival of antiquated tribal land claims. I’m going to be a participant on one of the panels, which will feature a distinguished assemblage of law professors and others; another reason for my interest in the topic is that a chapter on Indian law figures in my book in progress on the influence of law schools on American law. More details here.
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The legal humor site has nominated its favorite stories of 2008. Among them:
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Individual liberty, free markets, and peace: the world's premier libertarian think tank. Publishes Cato at Liberty, where I blog on contemporary policy issues.